Krebs on Security

In-depth security news and investigation

Posts Tagged: microsoft patches

Microsoft on Tuesday posted eight security updates to fix serious security vulnerabilities in computers powered by its Windows operating system. Separately, Adobe pushed out a patch to plug at least nine holes in its Flash Player software.

Leading the batch of Microsoft patches for 2015 is a drama-laden update to fix a vulnerability in Windows 8.1 that Google researchers disclosed just two days ago. Google has a relatively new policy of publicly disclosing flaws 90 days after they are reported to the responsible software vendor — whether or not that vendor has fixed the bug yet. That 90-day period elapsed over the weekend, causing Google to spill the beans and potentially help attackers develop an exploit in advance of Patch Tuesday.

For its part, Microsoft issued a strongly-worded blog post chiding Google for what it called a “gotcha” policy that leaves Microsoft users in the lurch. Somehow I doubt this is the last time we’ll see this tension between these two software giants. But then again, who said patching had to be boring? For a full rundown of updates fixed in today’s release, see this link. Continue reading →

If you use Windows XP and haven’t yet updated your system with the applicable security updates that Microsoft issued Tuesday, you might want to hold off for a bit. Turns out, a non-trivial number of XP users are reporting that their systems suffer from the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) and fall into an interminable reboot loop after installing the latest batch of patches from Redmond.

The problem seems to be affecting only some XP systems. This thread on a Microsoft.com answers forum seems to include a fix that works. However, the fix requires users to have their XP install CD handy (in a practice that should be outlawed, many computer makers get away with shipping systems without an install/reinstall disc)

According to the support forum threads I’ve seen on this, affected users noticed the problem on the reboot following the installation of Tuesday’s patch batch. The folks who complained of the bootup problem said the BSOD error page is accompanied by the message “PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA”.

If you’re experiencing the above-described problems after installing Tuesday’s bundle of updates, follow these steps, which a number of affected users have said seem to fix the problem: